Saturday, March 30, 2013

'The Suffragettes were in the organ'

I’ve
been so busy preparing The Bristol Suffragettes for publication (expected in
May) that I haven’t had a chance to write a blog for ages. With publication
date drawing near, though, I’ve been thinking about dates quite a bit, and in
particular how hard they, and other details, are to pin down. Surprisingly,
that’s true even for recent and well-recorded events such as the suffrage
campaign. You’d think that with newspapers, books, recordings and films available
for us to consult, not to mention diaries and autobiographies, it would be comparatively easy to sort out the facts.

Well,
it isn’t!

Take
the case of the suffragettes who hid overnight in the organ in the Colston Hall,
Bristol in 1909 to interrupt local MP Augustine Birrell’s speech the next day. According
to A Nest of Suffragettes in Somerset by B M Willmott Dobbie (1979), the
suffragettes were Elsie Howey and Vera Wentworth and the event took place on 2
May. Dobbie includes a rousing description of the event taken from Annie
Kenney’s memoirs, Memories of a Militant (1924). Annie was the organiser in Bristol
and arranged the protests, so she ought to know what happened. In her account, the two suffragettes went to a concert in the hall on the previous night
and afterwards hid in the organ until the next evening, munching on chocolate
and apples. Annie goes on to describe the hilarious scenes during Birrell’s
talk as stewards “scampered here, there, and everywhere” in an attempt to find
the source of the cries “Votes for Women!”. “The night and day spent in the
organ had,” concluded Annie, “served its purpose.”

A
great stunt, no doubt about it. But did it really happen like that? I first
began to wonder when I noticed that 2 May was a Sunday. It seemed odd to me
that a political meeting was held on a Sunday. No doubt people did hold
meetings on Sundays, but I thought I’d just double check. I looked in The Women’s
Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928 (Elizabeth Crawford, 1999),
which confirmed in the entry on Elsie Howey that it was on 2 May that Elsie
Howey and Vera Wentworth hid in the organ. However, the entry for Vera
Wentworth didn’t mention the event.

I
found this a bit puzzling so decided to take another book off my shelf. I
looked in Antonia Raeburn’s The Militant Suffragettes (1973) and found that
Elsie Howey had been accompanied by Vera Holme, not Vera Wentworth. I went back
to The Women’s Suffrage Movement and in the entry for Vera Holme found
confirmation of this. Vera Holme had written a verse account of the incident in
the suffragette newspaper, Votes for
Women, on 7 May which both Crawford and Raeburn mentioned. So it seemed
fairly clear that the women were Elsie Howey and Vera Holme, not Vera Wentworth.

However,
while The Women’s Suffrage Movement entry on Holme repeated that the date was 2
May, Antonia Raeburn gave it as Saturday 1 May. She also said that the women
had hidden in the organ during the Saturday afternoon, not on the previous
night. This was corroborated by Vera Holme’s verse account, quoted in The
Militant Suffragettes under the title “An Organ Recital” which read: “Seated
one day in the organ/We were weary and ill at ease;/ We sat there three hours
only,/Hid midst the dusty keys”. I also found a passage in Katherine Roberts’s Pages from
the Diary of a Militant Suffragette (1910) which noted on 7 May 1909, “I want
to make a note of an amusing parody I read in to-day’s Votes for Women…the
other day two of our members contrived, during the afternoon, to slip in unobserved
and hid in the organ.” Roberts went on quote Vera Holme’s poem, which she
called “An Organ Record”. This was also the title given in the Crawford entry
on Vera Holme. So now I had two titles for the poem.

Finally,
I checked the newspapers and found an article in The Guardian on 3 May 1909
which clearly stated that Mr Birrell had been interrupted during a speech in
the Colston Hall on Saturday 1 May. However, The Guardian made reference to only
one woman hiding in the organ: “She was found behind a group of pipes, and she
was speedily rushed from the hall…” So now I had only one woman.

Now,
I’m not trying to point out other people’s errors because in fact I’d made the
exact same error myself in my Spotlight On entry on Vera Wentworth – I’d put
her in the organ with Elsie Howey on 2 May (now corrected – due out
soon!). The point I want to make is that even though we have access to so many
records nowadays, it’s still not as straightforward as you think to get the facts
right – and I wouldn’t say I was 100% confident now! Confusions can very easily
creep in, and for the very best of reasons.

Annie
Kenney’s account was written many years after the events, from memory, and did
not always get the author’s full attention – she wrote sections of the book
while taking her baby out for a walk. In addition, there were a number of incidents
when suffragettes hid overnight in what Mrs Pankhurst called “dangerous positions, under platforms, in the organs,
wherever they could” to get a chance of asking a Government Minister about
votes for women. Emily Wilding Davison hid in a cupboard in the House of
Commons on Census Night, 2 April 1911. On 8 May 1909, a suffragette hid for 24 hours under a platform in a hall in Liverpool to interrupt Birrell. There was even another “suffragette in
the Colston Hall organ” incident in 1912, when two women hidden in the organ interrupted
a speech by Mr Hobhouse, Liberal MP Bristol East. In Annie Kenney’s memoirs, it
was during this episode that the women got into the hall during the afternoon. It
seems likely that Annie muddled up the two Bristol events. In addition, Elsie Howey and
Vera Wentworth often worked together in the south west, so it’s easy to see why
their names become connected.

I have one more check to make on the
1909 episode, which is to consult Votes
for Women for 7 May 1909. Then I’ll see what I can find out about 1912…goodness
only knows how much more confused that will leave me! For now, I’m going with
Elsie Howey and Vera Holme in the Colston Hall organ on the afternoon and
evening of Saturday 1 May1909...

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.